


ashes in my wake

by kindclaws



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Bellamy is an angry little shit, Character Study, F/F, canon-verse, girl!Bellamy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-28
Updated: 2015-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-11 15:44:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4441715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindclaws/pseuds/kindclaws
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"How about we call you Bella for short?"</p><p>	"My name is Bellamy," she says stubbornly. </p><p>	"That's not usual for a girl."</p><p>	"Bellamy," she repeats. There is something beneath her skin, something scaled and sabertoothed and vicious, and it demands to be acknowledged. No one ever tries to call her Bella after that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ashes in my wake

**Author's Note:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS: canon-typical levels of violence, Bellamy being an utter asshole, the usual self-loathing that comes with the territory of accidentally causing the death of 300+ people. Let me know if I missed anything.
> 
> Feel free to listen to Arsonist's Lullaby as you read.

 

...

 

Bellamy's earliest memories are unclear - fleeting whispers of warm scratchy blankets against freckled skin and Aurora's chin resting against her hair, her mother's body rocking her gently to sleep. There's a song she used to sing when Bellamy was small, the thought of which always makes Bellamy's stomach tie into knots and her toes curl in her too-small shoes. Only snatches of it remain in her mind, and Aurora never sings it after her stomach starts to swell a second time, but Bellamy thinks it wasn't in drawling English, or Russian, or the silver-tongued Portuguese they speak in Mecha Station.

Here is what she does remember, before Octavia, before she learned to duck her head and keep her mouth shut and stay out of trouble. Bellamy's first day of school, the teacher pushes his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose - it must be some kind of nervous tic, he has done it seven times already since Aurora departed with a single warning look.

"Bellamy Blake," he calls, frowning at the attendance list. The glasses slip, his face slick with sweat though it's barely mid-morning. A wrinkled, trembling hand push them back into place. "How about we call you Bella for short?"  
  
"Bellamy," she says stubbornly. It is the first word she has said since she sat down.  
  
"That's not usual for a girl."  
  
"Bellamy," she repeats. Her cheeks are still round with youth, her limbs toothpick-thin and her voice too high and childish to command the attention of a room, but there is something beneath her skin, something scaled and sabertoothed and vicious, and it demands to be acknowledged. The elderly teacher gives a start, adjusting his glasses, and he must see something in the set of Bellamy's jaw and the burn of her gaze, because no one ever tries to call her Bella after that.  
  
A name is a name is a name, it is a label and a rusted cage and a mark she claws into the wall of the Ark when no one's looking, and then scratches out because Bellamy is not a usual name and she has no desire to be searched out and arrested and left to the mercy of open space.

But a name is never just a name to a Blake.

Aurora doesn't let her call her _mom_ or _mama_ or _mother_ or any other variation.

"Aurora," she demands, one hand grasping Bellamy's chin and forcing it up so their eyes meet. Her fingernails dig into Bellamy's jaw and she reacts without thinking, batting the hand away with as much force as she can muster in her five year old body. There is a tiny space underneath the lower bunk that Bellamy scrambles into before Aurora's hand can catch onto the back of her ratty shirt and drag her back for discipline.  
  
She crawls into the very back of the gap, feels cold metal press against her from three directions. The chill is most prominent on the bare skin of her cheek, where crescent moon indents from Aurora's nails still sting. Aurora kneels at the side of the bunk, peers into the darkened crevice and demands for Bellamy to come out. Her hand reaches out, and Bellamy shies away, feels the apartment wall against her back. Aurora doesn't fit under the bunk, and her hand grasps around for a moment but retracts with only thin air pouring through her fingers.

"Why do you make this so difficult for me, Bellamy?" Aurora says, her voice cracking with tears, and Bellamy says nothing, turning her face the other way so she doesn't see the crack of light where Aurora's feet stand. She remains there for several hours, breathing in dust and silence, and the chasm between her and her mother only widens.  
  
When Bellamy is grown she remembers that distance between Aurora's grasping hand and her own tiny, frail body as she forced herself into the dark space under the bunk where monsters hide, and she thinks to herself that for the rest of Aurora's life, that distance grows larger and larger but never any smaller.

A few months later Aurora moves slowly in their apartment, her stomach bloated, her feet swollen. Bellamy watches from across the table as Aurora's practiced hands thread a needle through a dead man's clothes, and her rhythm falters. Aurora swears underneath her breath as the needle draws a pinprick of blood from her finger. She sets her sewing down, her other hand coming to cup the swell of her stomach underneath the baggiest shirt she could get her hands down. She's been doing that a lot lately. Bellamy doesn't keep count, like she did with her first teacher and the glasses that were always sliding down the hooked curve of his nose, but she knows its a high number all the same.

There's a baby growing inside of Aurora, and Bellamy is terrified.

She wakes up at night with the taste of ozone in her mouth and leans over the bunk, looking at her mother's silhouette in the darkness. The bump of her stomach is always there after she wakes up gasping, tangled in her sheets, and that is not supposed to be comforting.

Bellamy is terrified. She is terrified and furious and resentful, and all those emotions are too big and raging for her little body and that's why she can't sleep anymore.

 _Stop growing it_ , she wants to tell Aurora, wants to scream into the silence. _I'm sorry. I'll be good again. You won't need to replace me anymore. Please. Stop it. Why wasn't I enough?_

Instead she lies back down on her too-thin mattress and stares at the ceiling with wide brown eyes. Her breath comes in too fast and too shallow, and something like the ghost of a sob breaks through her lips. Suddenly Bellamy is five years old again, pressed underneath the bunk, refusing Aurora's touch. Her fingernails scrape against the ceiling until they are raw and aching, but it doesn't give under her assault.

This is what it is, this tragic reality. The baby does not stop growing inside Aurora and Bellamy does not stop trembling inside herself. It is Aurora's second chance to be a mother, to raise a child without a snarling dragon for a soul. Bellamy turned out all wrong, all burning eyes and clenched fists and a silent, shaking anger where other children had joy and laughter. Aurora tells her she can't say anything and so Bellamy screams inside, where no one can hear her anyway.

Her nightmare becomes reality when Aurora doubles over in pain, her whole body curled around the bursting curve of her stomach.

 _Why wasn't I enough?_ Bellamy wants to ask when fluid drips down Aurora's thighs and onto the floor of their apartment. _I would have tried to be good if I knew you'd replace me._

And then there is something from nothing, a tiny bundle of blood and flesh and soft cries nestled in Bellamy's arms, and her heart is still beating a death march in her ears but somehow she can no longer resent the baby for it, because it is no longer some cruel, faceless entity looming in her future like the sword of Damocles, but a _sister_. No one else on the Ark has a sister, and Bellamy feels special when she brushes her finger against her sister's lips and her cries instantly lessen.

Aurora collapses, exhausted, and leaves Bellamy to name the third Blake.

Her fear returns tenfold, and Bellamy paces violently in their tiny apartment, entertaining thoughts of running away with the baby and hiding somewhere where the Guard won't find her, where Aurora's outstretched hand won't reach for her. They will be wild girls, feral and free, and Bellamy's heart aches for the fantasy even as she knows they'll never make it.  
  
Bellamy's name is the only thing she has from her father. In the dark recesses of her mind, this is the expectation she has cultivated from the missing puzzle piece of her family, that when new life comes into the world, old life must leave. Her father named her, then died. Aurora wants Bellamy to name her sister, and then... Then what?

No one on the Ark has a sister, or a brother or any other variation of sibling. It is forbidden. New life comes into the world and old life must leave, and the only solution Bellamy sees is that she will be floated. Because she was too furious and too wary of a child, a demon where there should have been a girl.

"Augustus had a sister," Bellamy whispers, looking down at the creature, the _miracle_ in her arms. And Bellamy names her Octavia even though she believes she is signing her death warrant by doing so, because a name is a name is a name is never just a name to a Blake. At least this way, Bellamy's presence will be unavoidably intertwined with Octavia's life, a trace of her sibling permanently left in her identity even when Bellamy is gone.

But days pass, and then weeks, and Aurora carves a compartment underneath the floor, and no one comes to float Bellamy. This makes her wary, because in her mind there was no way for her and Octavia to coexist. No one on the Ark has a sister, but Bellamy does, and she doesn't know what that means yet, but she knows it makes her heart quiver in her throat.

 

 

......

 

 

People think Bellamy is stupid because she sits at the back of the class and doesn't speak or answer questions and glares at everyone who tries to sit next to her, but she is not. She is very, very smart, actually, and only a single one of her teachers catches on to this, and lets Bellamy borrow some of her books. Bellamy burns through each one in a day or two, sometimes three if the paragraphs are long-winded and Octavia is having a fussy day, but never more than three. But she waits longer than that, at least five or six days, before returning the books, because she is not supposed to be smart.

Bellamy is not supposed to stand out in any way. She and Aurora dress in gray, make stilted, polite conversation with their neighbours in Factory-17, and vanish into a backdrop of unremarkable Ark citizens. This is how they are to keep Octavia safe, for the rest of her life, however long it may be.

She is already angry with herself for having drawn the teacher's attention, no reason to prove herself intelligent beyond that by finishing the books early. So she waits, and recounts the stories to Octavia as she gets old enough to be interested, and a monotone imitation of a life passes by. Bellamy swallows down her rage and every restless urge in her veins that tells her _we are meant for something greater than this fucking shit_ , and she pretends to be dumb.

The problem is that she is not.

Bellamy is still relatively young when she realizes what Aurora does to keep Octavia safe, and she cannot look any man in the face for weeks after that. Underneath her drab, gray clothes, curves are forming where there were none before, and her face is losing that child-like quality that never suited her. She keeps her head down in the Ark's hallways and wears looser and rattier clothing but heads turn when she passes by. Bellamy has Aurora's prominent cheekbones and her father's bronze skin and a stare that is entirely her own that entraps anyone unlucky enough to get caught up in it. She is tall and terrifying and the teeth of Aurora's combs shatter on the thick tangles of her hair, but Bellamy refuses to cut it because Octavia likes playing with her long curls.

The attention makes her skin itch. She is not supposed to stand out in any way. This is how they are to keep Octavia safe.

Bellamy does not trust boys, or the men they grow up to be.

In the best case scenarios, they become her father, missing presences that Aurora speaks about only when prompted, and always with a vague, almost bemused air of _oh, I'd nearly forgotten_. In the worst case scenarios they are the panting creatures that whisper inspection dates into her mother's ears and paw at her hips when they come to pick up their repaired uniforms, and Bellamy can only turn her head away and stare at the wall because she no longer fits in the space underneath Aurora's bunk, the space where she always believed monsters hid.

Bellamy does not trust boys, and it is a shame because she thinks she could have loved them in another life, but it is all right because she likes girls too, and girls like her back. Girls are soft and heavy against Bellamy's callused palms, and they give the nicest gasps when Bellamy sinks her teeth into the curves of their shoulders. _Mine_ , she thinks viciously, when she trades her canines for the curve of her lips and presses apologetic kisses to reddening skin.

This is the only way she knows how to be kind.

She gets older and her kisses find more daring parts of the body. Bellamy doesn't know what it says about her that sometimes she only feels satisfied when there are fingers between her legs, buried knuckle-deep and only just barely beginning to fill up the emptiness she feels inside of her when she is not brimming with anger. It's easier to let her body's bliss wash away questions like these, so she does.

She cuts her teeth on other people's kindness. There is no such thing on the Ark, and touch is a better currency anyway.

It continues until one day in a locked supply closet a nameless girl grabs ahold of the black curls that tumble down Bellamy's back and _pulls_ as she arches with pleasure. Bellamy strikes her across the face before she can think, instinct forcing her hand. The silence after the blow as the girl's cheek reddens is deafening and they both stare at each other, one breathless with indignation, the other with anger.

"Did I say you could pull my hair?" Bellamy hisses, pushing her up even more against the wall. The other girl is taller and older but Bellamy has intimidated people twice her size and this is no exception. Her hands are shaking at her sides, fists clenched so tightly the knuckles are as white as bone. She is a wildfire, she is an inferno, she is the dragon tearing the countryside apart.  
  
"No, but that doesn't fucking mean you can hit me," the other girl says.  
  
And she has a point, but Bellamy is choking on her fury, on the sting of her scalp where an unforgivable line was crossed, and after that there are no more misadventures in storage closets. It seems she does not know how to be kind, after all.

At night she and Octavia share the top bunk, both small enough that they fit together despite knobby elbows and Bellamy's lanky limbs. Aurora calls them peas in a pod. Bellamy has a better word for it. Octavia is _hers_ , has been since Aurora pushed her into the arms of a six year old and passed out. Bellamy named her, rocked her to sleep with her finger pressed between two tiny, pink lips. Any other option is unthinkable.  
  
Bellamy twists her fingers into heroes and villains, and history plays out on the wall of their apartment, shadow puppets by the light of Aurora's lamp as she sews late into the night. Octavia claps at all the right places, her eyes drinking it in like a vagabond in the desert having just stumbled across an oasis. In some ways, that's what Octavia is - a lost soul without a place to call her own, a wanderer who walks only the ten by fourteen paces that measure their apartment. The only worlds she will ever visit are the ones Bellamy whispers to her along with the silhouettes on the walls.

"Are you filling her head with dreams again?" Aurora asks from down below. "That's enough, girls. Go to sleep."  
  
Bellamy bites back a retort, because _yes_ , she is sustaining Octavia with the threads of her own imagination. Aurora may be the one who brings back food - never enough - but Bellamy is the one who gives Octavia _life_ , or at least, a mockery that is the closest she'll ever be able to get. When they curl together and drift to sleep with only the growls of their stomach as a lullaby, it's Bellamy's stories that fill up the empty spaces where their rations run out.

"But I'm not tired," Octavia whines, and then Aurora relents, because Aurora always relents when it comes to Octavia, except when its time for her to be forced under the floor. "Bellamy, can I play with your hair?"  
  
"Sure," Bellamy says, sitting up and swinging her legs off the bunk so Octavia has better access to the thick curls that cascade down her back. She closes her eyes and tilts her head back as thin, bony fingers run through the tangles and scrape at her scalp.  
  
"I'm going to give you a princess braid," Octavia says matter-of-factly, and Bellamy feels her lips twitch with something that is not amusement. _I don't think either of us can be princesses_ , she thinks, but she says nothing. She is not Aurora, seeking to destroy hope where it desperately tries to find a foothold in the smooth metal walls of their prison. Bellamy is something else entirely.

She is a balancing act between vicious and gentle, teetering on the precipice, waiting for a single gust of wind to blow her into one camp or another.

 

 

......

 

 

Aurora buys Bellamy a shot at the Guard with forced sultry smiles and kisses behind closed doors. Bellamy is smoking with anger even before she knocks over a box of buttons and tassels to hide the tuft on Octavia's toy, even before Aurora looks at her with barely disguised contempt.

Afterwards, Bellamy strides into the training room with her head held high, any hesitation or fear she might have had burned away by the fire inside of her.

"Go away, kid," they tell her.  
  
"Try me," Bellamy insists, and in the center of a boxing ring she dances around men twice her size, dares to believe she might have a chance through agility and sheer force of will, until a stray punch knocks her down and sends stars into her eyes. If she needed stars, she'd have looked out a window. She gets to her feet, a puppet pulling on its own strings, wipes blood away from her mouth.  
  
It goes on like this, Bellamy thrown to the floor and struggling to stand again. The training room is silent, all the others having paused in their exercises to watch this teenage girl make a fool of herself.

 _Hell is a teenage girl_ , Bellamy reminds herself as she forces herself upright for the seventh time. Her opponent blurs in two, four fists raised to rain spite on her freckled skin. She can be beaten and bleeding and downtrodden, but Bellamy is unafraid because they cannot destroy her. She is sparks from exposed wiring, she is blazing fire, she is a legend still untold. She will rain hell. She will be hell.

"Stand down," a voice outside of the boxing ring says. Bellamy sways but does not look away from her opponent. "I said, stand down. That's an order."  
  
She lowers her fists, still does not turn her head, licks copper off her lips. She's never been rich enough to afford lipstick, so it's almost fitting that she coats the arched bow of her mouth with a different sort of scarlet.

"I haven't seen that much fire in a person in years," the voice outside the boxing ring says, and she almost laughs at the understatement. "What's your name?"  
  
"Bellamy Blake," she says, spitting her name out like a curse. She hopes it is, on all these people who look down their noses at her.  
  
"Well, Bellamy Blake," the voice says. "Welcome to the Guard. Report here at 7 hours tomorrow morning for your uniform."  
  
"Yes sir," she says. She does not say thank you. This is not a gift. She earned this with her blood and her sweat and the tears she hasn't shed.  
  
They send her to the med bay. Bellamy shakes off her escort, stumbles along the hallways alone. Parents pull their children out of the way when they see her bruised and beaten, dripping blood from her nose and tiny cuts along her face and hands, and for the first time Bellamy is sorry. She does not want to scare children, only the creatures that lurk under beds and in shadows behind the door.  
  
The apprentice on duty when Bellamy stumbles in can't be more than sixteen. But despite her youth and the clarity of her blue eyes, she treats the med bay as her own domain. Bellamy watches her gather cottonballs and disinfectant silently, this princess in a kingdom preened for her from birth.

"This is going to hurt," the girl warns as she approaches Bellamy with alcohol-doused cotton, and Bellamy just stares her down and doesn't flinch when her skin stings. She knows how to deal with pain.  
  
A flash of black and blue on the back of her hand as she withdraws catches Bellamy's eye. Her hand darts out, captures the girl's wrist and pulls it back to her. The girl has painted herself with ink, dragged pens along the surface of her skin until something beautiful was left behind.

"You draw?" Bellamy asks, voice flat, betraying none of the curiosity she feels.  
  
"Yeah," the girl says, tugging her hand away with a little more force than necessary. Bellamy would have let her go at the slightest movement. She knows what it's like to be held against your will.  
  
"Can you draw me something?" Bellamy asks, tilting her head. "I'll pay you."  
  
"I don't need any extra rations," the girl says, and Bellamy snorts. Of course she doesn't, little princess that she is.  
  
"I wasn't talking about extra rations," Bellamy says, her voice low and dangerous. She first learned seduction by watching Aurora, but her tutelage didn't stop there. Now she does it without even thinking, knowing all the angles to hold her head so that the strong curve of her neck is bared enticingly, knowing just how to look at a girl through her lashes to make her meaning clear.  
  
"I'll draw something for you anyway," the girl says, and she meets Bellamy's eyes, briefly, and glances away, a flush on her cheeks. "I don't need anything in return."  
  
_Suit yourself_ , Bellamy thinks to herself, and comes back in a few days to pick up a sketch of a girl with long dark hair standing in a forest looking up at the sky, feet planted firmly like the flag of a conquering army, arms thrown out to the side triumphantly.

"It's so pretty," Octavia says, voice soft with wonder when Bellamy hangs it up in their bunk. 

"Of course it is," Bellamy says. "I'd only bring back the best for you."

 

  
  
......

 

 

  
Her arrogance is her downfall - her pride in her ability to make Octavia smile easier than Aurora can. She unveils a paper mask as though it's a chest of sunken treasure from the pretend-pirate games they play. Octavia's eyes burn bright through the eyeholes.

"Well," she says, leaning forward, utterly focused on Bellamy's reply. "How do I look?"  
  
She looks like the girl she should have been, a ghost of a possibility that vanished when Bellamy came out of the womb first. Octavia took her first breaths of recycled air, already breathed in and out by three dead generations, took her first teetering steps ready to seize the world and inherited secrecy and two-thirds a portion of rations instead.

Bellamy stole the life she could have had, has been trying to make up for being a thief all her life. And this paper mask is just another in a long string of wordless apologies - but this one, Bellamy thinks, is better than all the others, because for once Octavia will be able to see the Ark for herself. It is still a cage, but one a little bigger than that she is used to, and perhaps that freedom will be enough to sate her.

Later, when the flares go off and guards tear the paper mask off Octavia's frightened, youthful face, Bellamy realizes she was horribly, terribly wrong.

It was never going to be enough. Paper is the easiest thing to tear. And then she can only watch as her little sister is dragged from one cage to another, Aurora is floated, and Bellamy is stripped of everything she paid for in blood and sweat. She goes back to her apartment, unable to see through her tears, and screams because the silence is deafening - it has not been this quiet since Bellamy was six years old and the first feeble cries of a baby split the air.

She does not fit in the space under the bunk that used to belong to Aurora, and to Bellamy, this is perhaps the universe's greatest injustice - one last joke of which she is the punchline. There is no humour in this, in her sin, in her ruin.

_And then there was one._

Bellamy has condemned her family to death, has been left to shoulder the blame. She belongs with the monsters under the bed - maybe they can teach her a thing or too about tearing the sorrow out of herself until she grows cold and uncaring and stops shaking on the floor, too weak to stand. But here is the punchline - Bellamy has always had a wildfire burning in her ribcage, and even this can't stamp out those flames.

They are still smoldering a year later when Shumway puts a gun in her hands and tells her to commit murder for her sister.

 _Why not?_ Bellamy thinks. Aurora's face swims in her mind, with stars instead of eyes and void where her breath should be. _I've done it before._

The gun's metal is freezing cold no matter how long or how tight she holds it in her hand, and she tries to absorb that cold, tries to make herself ice as she lines up her sights and takes the shot. Red blooms across the stomach of the man who sentenced her mother to death, and Bellamy is still burning, destroying everything in her path.

The dropship creaks and groans as it falls through the atmosphere, tearing apart castles in the clouds and bursting into fire, and Bellamy thinks _we are one and the same_.

 

 

......

 

 

On the ground, watching Octavia take the first steps onto soil, Bellamy thinks to herself, this is no birthright - this is nothing less than a conquest, and she will make sure it will be remembered as such. She gathers children around her with the same purring voice that had Octavia hanging onto every word of her bedtime stories, makes an army out of juvenile delinquents.

Bellamy will scream her success out until it drowns out all the voices that whisper of her mistakes. She will write over the past in pen, make it better, make herself a figure of legend until even Octavia forgets that it was she who tore her life apart and couldn't sew it back together afterwards. She did not inherit her mothers long, clever fingers. Instead, rage and indignation were her birthright, and she will make them her legacy.

There is only one problem, of course, and that's the blonde haired princess that warned her of the sting of antiseptic and touched Bellamy's bruised face with such tenderness that Bellamy almost forgave her for it.

Clarke Griffin stands Bellamy down, tries to speak over a voice honed by tragedies of old and of her own, and Bellamy looks at her with pity in her heart and contempt in her throat and disdain in all her veins and arteries, in all this blood that wasn't good enough for Alpha Station. And she thinks _I will burn through you if you stand in my way_.

Neither of them could know at that moment how wrong she is. History does not come with a look forward, only one back, and Bellamy is so focused on flickering through the pages that came before the apocalypse, trying not to make the mistakes of old heroes, that she walks into something she cannot stop - then Jasper walks into a spear, and Charlotte walks off a cliff, and she and Clarke Griffin walk back into camp with weighted souls and a new perspective on their bloodstained tale.

And yet, Bellamy knows it can't last. Once the Ark follows its discarded children down to Earth, there will be no place for her. She's grown too old, too large to hide, not in the space underneath the bunk and not within the walls she helped build with her own two hands. She'll have to turn tail and run.

She will go somewhere where children aren't condemned for arriving second into the world, where no one gets more food or more clothes or more medicine than anyone else, where birth and mistakes hold no heavy-hearted meaning.

One hundred children were plucked from prison and thrown into paradise, only to find it another form of punishment.

If Earth is the abandoned Garden of Eden, with only the shadows of humanity left behind as its people fled its atmosphere, does that make her the snake? Bellamy thinks it does. She wonders where the Tree of Knowledge is, and whether she'd regret the sticky-sweet drip of apple juice down her chin, if she were given the choice.

 

 

......

 

 

Raven falls out of the sky and her harsh words burrow under Bellamy's skin like bamboo splints.

She is the apple, the eye-opening truth, and Bellamy is torn between staggering relief at the news that Jaha survived and the horror of the dwindling air on the Ark. She resents Raven for telling her. How could she not?

“Can you wish on this kind of shooting star?” Clarke asks her as they're both craning their necks at the vivid flares that streak across the night sky, draping them all in deep reds and purples. They are all bloody and bruised. It is only fitting that their salvation would come in the same colours.

“I wouldn’t even know what to wish for," Bellamy lies.

She has been a liar all her life.

The bodies fall from the Ark like a meteor shower, on their final journey to the ground. They will find no loving shores here. Bellamy falls to her knees outside the camp where no one can see her. Her mouth opens wide, and she screams, but no sound comes out. She was six when Aurora told her to keep Octavia quiet. She is twenty-three when she tells herself to keep quiet, lest anyone see her weakness and attack.

Bellamy is an animal with a foot caught in a trap. The trap is the same as it always has been: despite the anger, despite her roughness, she has never been able to purge the stubborn kindness within her. She is a cold-blooded killer with a scorching-hot fire in her, she has condemned hundreds to a breathless death, and still she cannot bring herself to flee the camp nor the children she has pledged her allegiance to.

It will kill her, like it killed all those falling innocents burning up in the atmosphere, but perhaps then Bellamy will have her retribution.

 

 

......

 

 

She plunges a spike through flesh and tendon, and the Grounder doesn't make a sound.

Octavia slices her own skin instead of the enemy's, and gets the answer they were looking for anyway. Bellamy turns away and tries to not vomit with disgust at herself.

Aurora tried to raise her to be kind, to temper the fire and the tiny clenched fists and the stubborn set of her jaw. It didn't work. Bellamy breathed in the dust and the shadows beneath the bunk and became the monster hiding under the bed.

_Forgive me, mother, for I have sinned._

 

 

......

 

 

Clarke offers her forgiveness, not on a silver platter but with a muddy hand curled around hers as they collapse against a tree, feeling rough bark bury splinters into their bloody skin. The body of a boy that used to be Dax is sprawled at their feet. In death, he could be bowing. The crimson seeping out the side of his neck is his penance, his royal tax, the only willow branch he will ever extend to his vicious queens.

"I don't think it works like that," Bellamy says, staring up at the darkened canopy of trees overhead, trying in vain to catch a glimpse of stars between boughs of leaves.  
  
"It does if I want it to," Clarke says, and Bellamy sees the beginning of a forest fire in the stubborn set of her jaw. She kind of wants to kiss her, wonders if Clarke would bite back if she did.  
  
Bellamy doesn't. She is many things - a liar, and a murderer, and a thief, but she is tired of stealing for herself. No more moments that should have been Octavia's. Dax's atonement is the bullet in his throat, hers will be her misery.

"Okay," Bellamy says instead, and somehow she puts one foot in front of the other until she begins to recognize the forest surrounding their camp. "Wait."

"Bellamy?" Clarke asks, turning around to see why she's stopped. A shaft of moonlight piercing through the foliage above illuminates her blonde hair, makes her look ghostly and ethereal. Bellamy takes a step forward, and then another, and another, until she and Clarke stand so close that when Clarke exhales shakily, their chests brush. She waits, seeing if Clarke will step back.  
  
She doesn't.

Bellamy slips her hands on either side of Clarke's face, tilts it upwards so there's no doubt of her intentions. Clarke still doesn't move away. There's a challenge in her eyes, fierce and alluring, and Bellamy doesn't wait any longer.

Clarke doesn't kiss as nice as a princess should. She bites Bellamy's lip, runs her tongue too hard over sharp teeth, leaves her breathless and dazed. Bellamy kisses back even though it hurts because she needs this, she needs to feel alive, she needs to feel loved and hurt.

But then they spring apart at the hoot of an owl in the forest and back inside the camp, Clarke goes to Spacewalker to calm him down after he throws a fit at the sight of guns, and Bellamy is left with only a bitter taste in her mouth.

Jaha pardons her for shooting a bullet through his stomach and Bellamy hangs her head in relief and tries not to cry.

 

 

 

......

 

 

 

Fever burns, and Bellamy chokes up blood. Octavia brushes her hair out of her eyes, braids it back like she used to when they were schoolgirls without a single speck of death on their clothes.

"I won't let anything happen to you," Octavia whispers as Bellamy slips in and out of lucidity.  
  
_Funny_ , Bellamy thinks, _I said the same thing to you._  
  
Afterwards, she and Clarke both open their eyes and look at each other, and when Clarke reaches out and takes her hand, Bellamy's breath hitches.

She's still holding it outside, as they watch a cloud of smoke and ash take its rightful place among all the other ones.

"I am become death, destroyer of worlds," Clarke says, her voice hoarse at she stares at the sky, and Bellamy smirks and looks away. Clarke doesn't know anything about destruction, not yet at least. She can say that to Bellamy again after she's killed someone of her own, not an enemy with a snarl and a spear but someone she loves.  
  
Bellamy killed her mother and sent her sister into lockup for a year. If anyone's a destroyer of worlds, it's her.

 

  
  
......

 

 

One of Bellamy's conquests back on the Ark, a quiet girl that understood that Bellamy wasn't looking for anything meaningful enough that they would sometimes stay under the covers together long after sex because Bellamy knew she wouldn't make any of it, used to take her palm and search for truth in it.

"Your heart line looks awful," she'd say, puckering her lips in distaste at the calluses on Bellamy's palms. "See all these tiny breaks? You're going to have a hard time loving people."  
  
"No kidding," Bellamy had muttered, her free arm tossed over her face so the overhead light wouldn't burn her eyes. She was just about to pull her hand away when the girl continued.  
  
"Your head line looks pretty good though, hopefully that means you'll have a lot of people going down on you," the girl teased. Bellamy raised her arm just enough to squint at her in satisfaction.  
  
"Is that so?" she asked, voice thick with sleep and satisfaction.  
  
"Mmm," the girl said, and had promptly ducked under the blankets. Palms weren't the only thing she read, though. Bellamy recalls her sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor in a loose tshirt and no pants, carefully arranging tarot cards in front of her.  
  
Bellamy remembers feeling sick to her stomach when the girl flipped the Hanged Man over in front of her, remembers thinking of Octavia hiding in her hole under the floor and that they could be killed for that at any given moment.

"It doesn't necessarily represent death," the girl had explained thoughtfully. "That's the most obvious explanation, but life never hands us the answers quite that easily. If I had to guess I'd say you're going to be a false martyr. You and the Hanged Man are living life in suspension, see, look at his face. He's not suffering. He's at peace. He's the bridge between the divine and the universe."  
  
Bellamy remembers looking at the Hanged Man's face and seeing only faded ink where the girl saw prophecy. She never went back to her, afterwards, not because she didn't like her, but because Bellamy remembered the Hanged Man every time she saw her and it always left her reeling, clutching at the wall for balance as though if she didn't, she'd be turned upside down like the traitor on the card.

Then at age twenty-three, Murphy lowers the dropship ramp just long enough for her and Jasper to switch places, and when the door closes behind her again, Bellamy finally understands.  
  
At Murphy's bequest she ties her own noose and puts it around her neck. Murphy pulls on the rope of seatbelts, and Bellamy feels it tighten around her throat. _I am the false martyr_ , she reminds herself, her thoughts overlaid with the melodious voice of a girl left behind on the Ark. _I'm not suffering, I'm suspended. I'm at peace._

Except that when the stool drops and she can no longer breathe, Bellamy finds she's not at peace at all. She's not done living, not done raging at this world until she can rage at the next. The furious fire in her burns hotter than ever before, and it's not until the rope releases and she falls to the floor that it starts to dim to a tolerable glow.

Bellamy gasps for air on the floor of the dropship and wonders how the tarot cards could have known. Underneath the floor, Raven bleeds, and Bellamy walks free with a necklace of bruises.

There's more than just the beauty of a parallel in the method of murder that Murphy chose. It was a deliberate decision, Bellamy thinks, to attack her most powerful part. Because her words are her most dangerous weapon, are they not? Not her fists, or her gun, or the softness of her body, but the wildfire in her chest that doesn't let her breathe and the inflamed promises that spill from her lips.

She'd laugh, if it didn't hurt to make a sound.

 

 

......

 

 

 

Bellamy declares war, takes it back at Clarke's request and then declares it again when it becomes painfully clear peace is no longer an option. She looks at her army of children with rifles slung across their arms like safety blankets, and decides she will apologize to the ones that survive, after all this ends.

Darkness falls, and Bellamy strains to look into the forest, gun pressed tightly against her shoulder. She sees the boy in the foxhole next to her take an arrow through the chest and runs out of ammo. Octavia crumples in her arms, sword at her side, and the Grounder appears to take her away.

"May we meet again," Bellamy whispers, pressing her forehead against Octavia's, and hopes that there will be more of her left for Octavia to see than a rotted corpse.  
  
Then they call for retreat, for the blast off that will burn away every living thing in range, and Bellamy starts to stumble back to the dropship.

She never makes it. Between Tristan's blows she hears Clarke calling for her to come back, and she's _fucking trying, okay, you try getting hit in the face by this bald asshole and see how well you do, Clarke_. She falls to the ground and sees a blurry figure running towards them from behind Tristan, sees the dropship ramp start to creep up.

 _Good girl_ , Bellamy thinks with savage pride, and then Finn slings her arm over his shoulder and heaves her to her feet, drags her away from the clearing and into one of the tunnels. They burrow into dirt, smelling rot and wet leaves and the copper dripping from Bellamy's wounds, and Bellamy can feel Finn shaking. She wonders if she is too. She feels oddly at peace.

Fire bursts overhead, flames licking at the mouth of the tunnel and sending a wave of heat through them that scorches the ends of Bellamy's hair and makes her cough violently for several moments. The fire keeps burning above their heads, and in their salvation under the soil she and Spacewalker gasp for breath.

Bellamy remembers looking at Clarke when they first stepped foot on Earth and thinking she'd burn through Clarke if she stand in her way. She hears the crackle of fire on green branches in her ears, and starts to laugh.

"What's so funny?" Finn snaps, huddled against the opposite wall of the tunnel. He looks utterly miserable, covered in blood and ash and mud like they all are.

 _You wouldn't understand_ , Bellamy thinks. She's just realized Clarke is made of the same hardness as her, and wonders how it took her so long to recognize a kindred flame. They are two sides of the same coin, these arsonist girls who will go to the worst kinds of lengths to keep their people safe. _Now_ , by closing the dropship door while she and Finn were still outside, Clarke has become one of her own, death, destroyer of worlds. Bellamy wants to kiss her again, feel her teeth on her mouth. There will be no gentleness for them, no, never for them, these cruel daughters of downfall. They show their love with murder and conquest and drag out their affection between clenched teeth and broken ribs.  
  
"Nothing," Bellamy says with a bitter smile. She read somewhere that wildfires destroy everything in their path but then leave room for tiny saplings to start growing in place of the thick canopy that was there before. If the Grounders were here before, does that make them the saplings, growing up in ash and bone? Does that make her and Clarke the fire itself? Or is Bellamy the fire and Clarke the rain that comes afterwards to choke the rivers with ash?  
  
She turns away, looking to the mouth of the tunnel where a golden glow is tearing through the forest. There was a song Aurora used to sing to Bellamy when she was small, and she remembers only snatches of it, but it is in her blood, in the fire that forged her. She starts to hum, a lullaby for the warriors dying outside the tunnel. She trails off after she can remember no more, and closes her eyes to the crackle and pop of a vicious blaze.  
  
And in silence they wait for the fires to abate.

 

...

**Author's Note:**

> #overlyflowerylanguage  
> Genderbends (or spectrumslides as they're also known) are often really interesting tools to explore sexism in our society. According to the 100 writers sexism was eradicated in this universe along with most of humanity (don't drag me into a debate about whether or not that was a good narrative choice, I'm just going with it) so instead I decided to focus on other aspects of femininity. Give me more dark and scary and vicious girls.  
> The part about Bellamy not trusting men was inspired by a very good meta post on tumblr that I have been unable to locate, but if anyone knows which one I'm talking about, feel free to comment and I'll link it here! It was very well put and I agree wholeheartedly. Bellamy loves girls in any universe. I'm so proud of the tarot card scene.  
> Title from Arsonist's Lullaby by Hozier. I only realized after I finished that it worked very well as a song for this, which is funny considering the absurd amount of references to fire. I swear the link was unintentional.  
> Only covered season one here, I think I might do another chapter for season 2, and if I like season 3 I might do a chapter for that too. I have a lot of feelings about girl!Bellamy, please link me to all the fics.  
> That's about it. Thanks for reading!
> 
> P.S Find me on tumblr as kindclaws!


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